Lead Game Designer

The game

We're excited to be working on a new dwarven themed colony sim game with strategy, survival and base-building elements. It has been in active development for nearly two years already and we now have the backing of a world class strategy publisher along with the UK Games Fund, who will both help us make the best game possible. The game is being developed using Unity.

The role

We are hiring a Lead Game Designer who will work with the Project Lead and the rest of the team to lead all things design. You will initially work closely with the Project Lead, who has been the lead designer up until this point, and tend towards more autonomy as you get up to speed with the project. You will need to lead the team by owning your design decisions, communicating them clearly and effectively, and handling situations where things don't go right.

Your day to day duties will include:

• Designing and iterating on features and systems.
• Working inside of Unity to test and balance features and systems.
• Communicating your designs to programmers, artists and the Project Lead.
• Organising internal and external playtests and gathering and processing feedback.

Who we're looking for

You should apply to this role if you feel that you:

• have a deep understanding of what makes colony sim games tick. You probably have hundreds of hours in games like RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included, Against the Storm, Frostpunk or similar.
• have a skill for balancing many complex and interconnecting game systems.
• are comfortable leading a team of 5-10 people.
• have an interest in popular culture / fantasy culture / gaming culture, and have a good understanding of market trends.
• have the desire and potential to become a Game Director/Project Lead on future projects.
• are fluent inside of Unity, or can show that you will be able to pick it up quickly.
• take pride in your work and care about the quality of yours and other peoples work.
• have personally, or part as a team, shipped something before.
• are direct and happy to raise problems early, and you are happy to work hard resolving them.

Nice to haves

You'd be an even stronger candidate if you:

• are comfortable handling day to day production activities.

The Hugecalf team

We are a small company working fully remotely across the UK and Europe. We makes games which aren't only fun to play but are fun to make as well. We have a strong team with a proven track record, having released 3 games to date and with 2 more in the pipeline. We work closely and all have a large impact on the games we make.

We maintain a happy and productive team environment with things like:

• Daily standup catchup calls
• Weekly social playtests (of other people's games!)
• Monthly external playtests (of our own games)
• Yearly social meetup
• Generous holiday allowance

We work within normal UK working hours. We conduct calls with cameras on.

Basic requirements

• You must have a right to work in the UK, and currently live in the UK. This is unavoidable due to funding requirements.
• You must be fluent in both written and spoken English. This is a requirement because we are fully remote team and all our communication is done via online calls and messaging.

Contract

• Starting ASAP.
• An initial full-time 3 month contract, which is your month probation period.
• Upon passing probation, a full-time fixed term contract scoped to the project duration.
• There is always the intention to move someone onto a PAYE employment in the long run, if they are eligible and it is an agreeable arrangement to both sides. We have a track record of doing this with our current team members.

How to apply

The application below will take somewhere between 15 minutes and several hours, depending on how much preparation you want to put into it. There is the usual stuff like basic details about yourself and your experience, followed by a more indepth section where you are asked to provide screen recordings to take us through some design related areas. These screen recordings are optional, but submissions which include them will be considered first.

Your progress is saved, so you can come back to the application later if required.

This is a continuous hiring process, so there is no date by which we will make our decision. As such we can't give you a date by which we'll respond to your application. However, we are committed to respond to every application we receive. Applications that do not meet the basic requirements will be closed straight away, with everything else getting read by a team member.